Drug Highs and Irreversible Lows

Dael Orlandersmith’s “Horsedreams” begins with a paean to Saturday night. At first it seems like mere scene-setting when Desiree, dancing at a club, describes her week as a prelude to letting loose, but it becomes an apt metaphor for an unbalanced life.

The playwright and actor Ms. Orlandersmith (“Yellowman,” “The Gimmick”) has long demonstrated a theatrical intelligence, ferocious stage presence and gift for staccato language. Characteristically built on stark, subjective monologues in counterpoint, her new piece is the work of an assured artist. Maybe too assured, since it’s so austere and pared down of inessentials that one sometimes wishes for the more poetic flourishes that this artist is capable of.

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Horsedreams From left, Roxanna Hope, Michael Laurence and Matthew Schechter play a family and Dael Orlandersmith a nanny in Ms. Orlandersmith's play, at the Rattlestick Theater.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

At the club, Desiree (Roxanna Hope) meets Loman (a name that should inspire theatergoers’ dread), and their relationship economically moves from courtship to pregnancy to marriage to Westchester. Then her cocaine habit leads to slow self-destruction. Onstage staring silently in the background is Ms. Orlandersmith. Her plays often deal with the varying ways one is seen, but still, this is a distracting choice, especially since the most talented artist onstage is a bystander for much of the play.

The plot later shifts to the relationship between Desiree’s son, Luka (Matthew Schechter), and his nanny, Mira (Ms. Orlandersmith), who has seen the effect of drugs in her own family. Ms. Orlandersmith’s quiet, yearning intensity makes you wish she had integrated her role into the play sooner. The director, Gordon Edelstein, leads a streamlined staging on a striking, abstract set by Takeshi Kata dominated by a fractured, wall-size metal plate. As Loman, Michael Laurence, a patrician type with a square jaw, draws a humane portrait of an entitled careerist fraying at the edges. Mr. Schechter is absolutely wonderful as his child who makes seeming older than his years tragic.

What sticks with you in this spare production is less the characters than the allure and damage of drugs. In an otherwise bleak play, the moments of getting high are those where Ms. Orlandersmith’s writing soars. Desiree’s monologues make cocaine sound thrilling. This is a portrait of drug use that doesn’t lie about its pleasures. When Mira remembers how her father shot up, she describes his face becoming calm and familiar, the one that wooed his wife and soothed his children. The implication is that getting high did not distort his personality but from one perspective turned him into who he really was. Or, perhaps more terrifying, it was him at his best.